Abstract

Lightweight and flexible thermoelectric devices consisting of carbon nanotube (CNT)-based materials have the potential to be used for the various applications, such as energy harvesting from the low-temperature waste heat that exists ubiquitously in living areas. Because high-performance CNT-based materials are crucial for the broad-ranging employment of CNT-based thermoelectric devices, considerable efforts are being made to improve the power-generation capability of CNT-based thermoelectricmaterials. Here, we report high-performance thermoelectriccomposites consisting of CNT bundles and polystyrene fabricated by a planetary ball milling-based dispersion technique, which allows for the direct dispersion of the CNT bundles within the polystyrene matrix without causing the disaggregation of the bundled CNTs into individual ones. The CNT-bundles/polystyrene composites reported here exhibit a power factor of 413 μW/K2·m.

The authors gratefully acknowledge financial support from the Future Pioneering Projects program of the Ministry of Economy, Trade, and Industry, Japan. A part of this study was carried out at the Nano-Processing Facility operated by the Innovation Center for Advanced Nanodevices (ICAN), National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST), Japan.